My friend Rhodes Hileman is having quite an adventure in Puget Sound. For those of you who love to sail and for those of you who love tinkering with electronic gadgets, this post's for you.
For the last decade, much work has gone into my little Columbia 22 sailboat, and not a lot of sailing has come out of it. Not that it could not have sailed; sometimes it did, but I used to sail it much more in the nineties when it was in the SF Bay. Several comments from friends have converged to provoke me to bring a measure of closure on all projects, and actually go somewhere.
I'm headed to the San Juan Islands; I have rented a slip in Squalicum Harbor, Port of Bellingham, and sublet my slip on Lake Washington. I will bring the boat back in September.
Meanwhile I have saved up vacation time good for four more four-day weekends to be sprinkled across the summer this year. My first destination is Sucia Island State Park. GoogleEarth it.
The trip has been in planning for over a month, and much of the planning was done on Google Earth. I already had arranged to plug the serial port from my boat's Garmin GPS, through a converter, into a USB port on my laptop. Garmin's "Blue Chart" mapping system runs on my little HP DV1000, a "CarlyBook" (actually a Compaq in disguise).
The map on the computer will track my location from the GPS and keep the map moving appropriately. The computer's map is in color and much larger than the one on the Garmin. So I thought, "What can't I have Google Earth on the same machine?"
So I signed up for Clearwire, McCaw's follow up to the old Ricochet, a cell tech based, wireless ISP. It works great. Greatly? Really well. So I can see my navigation chart, and see satellite photos of my location.
Next, I need to get a small SVGA color flat screen that does 1280x1024. I can make that my second screen, and put the Garmin Blue Chart up there, giving me a whole screen for each app.
To replace my old Zeiss pocket camera, which bit the splash in the nineties, I got a Fuji Finepix Z33WP last week. That's 'WP' as in waterproof. It means IP68, dunkable to 3 meters. The camera is good fun, and does a lot of things well.
Unfortunately, in my last scan of what to bring I failed to think of the USB cable for the camera, nor the charger, so I can't send you the pix I am taking of this fine event. Guess I'll have to use my cell phone and upload to Facebook or Twitter.
Tonight, tied up at my first harbor (Shilshole), I have been "chatting" with my Facebook friends, linked via Clearwire radio, and powered by the sailboat's battery bank. I am jazzed to have connectivity in my little home on the water, and without the nuisance of wires.